Black Friday Store Traffic Hits 15-Year Lows

Black Friday is the official unofficial kickoff to the holiday shopping season and is supposed to help catapult retailers to profitability. This year, though, one analyst says customer traffic in physical stores is the weakest he's seen in 15 years of tracking guest counts. KeyBanc analyst Edward Yruma said the firm's e-commerce team conducted its annual channel checks for in-store and online traffic over the weekend and found it was "the weakest that we have observed in 15+ years of store checks."